ShazlanSufian.com

The purpose of split testing on AdWords is to always out perform your previous best ad. Doing so will lead you towards higher CTRs and lower bid costs. Now, the question becomes, how do you properly split test your ads?

Follow the process below and make sure that you are comparing apples to apples and not apples to oranges.

Once you have determined the winner from your 2 original ads (A and B), in this case A; what you want to do is then create 2 new ads, C and D.

Where ad C is the exact duplicate of the winning ad. And D is the new test ad that will be tested against your control ad (Ad C).

To start your new split test, just pause ads A and B and activate ads C and D.

You want to do it this way because, true split testing, means you are testing one variable that is different at a time e.g. Headline, Description Line 1 or 2, Display URL.

But you should also be aware that the time period is also a variable. By split testing ad D with A, the comparison would be incorrect. You need to reset the ads, by starting them all over again.

I know you can overcome the time period variable by filtering the results on Google AdWords by the respective date range. But I just find my way a lot cleaner.

Here is something that I do that you may want to adopt. You can delete ads A and B once you know for sure that ads C and D are running fine. But I just keep them paused. I do this for 2 reasons:

1. To keep a history of my ads online
2. To keep the ads visible on the offline AdWords Editor. When I edit ads I like to see a history of previous ads. If I delete the ads, they will not show up on AdWords Editor. Pausing is just a quick workaround for me.

I stumbled onto Howie Jacobson’s blog yesterday and found it to be a great resource for those starting to get involved with Google AdWords. Howie is the author of AdWords for Dummies and on his blog he shares a lot of helpful advice and tips on how to go about your business with AdWords.

There is also an excellent short report that he gives to people that sign up for his newsletter.

Based on what I have read on the blog and report I am definitely going to buy his book. I have started to grab as much material as I can to learn more on AdWords recently. You can never learn enough

I wanted to share with you a really handy tool I discovered some time back. It helps you get localized search and AdWords results for various countries. It has become the most used extension in my collection when I do my initial research into a market.

Because I am in Malaysia, Google will display search and AdWords results customized for Malaysia. What I have noticed, is that search results will tend to be slightly different, if not very different, compared to results displayed in the US for the same keyword.

The difference is even greater with AdWords ads. And that makes a whole lot of sense, because, most marketers would not consider Malaysia as part of their market. And therefore, their ads would not even show up on my search.

The result? If the US was my market too, I wouldn’t be getting the complete picture, because the majority of ads targeted for my market would not be showing up.

To solve this I need to tell Google to display the results “as if” I were also located in the US. Now there is a way to do this with the URL. But I could never remember it when I needed it. When looking for an alternative, I found this gem of an extension called Google Global by RedFly Marketing.

Once you have installed the extension, the easiest way to start using it, is to simply right click anywhere on the search page result and then select the country you want.

But this tool can do much more than just display results by country. You can fine tune your results by tweaking the options available. Check them out below.

Pretty powerful for doing very specific localized research.

Those of you returning to this blog will notice that I have changed the theme. I quite liked my previous theme’s clean look and feel. But there is actually a specific reason why I had to change it. I got a few emails from people who have been viewing my blog using Safari, who said that my blog was not showing well.

I checked it out and true enough, both my sidebars were not showing. So I decided to change it quickly. This current theme was the best one I could find that suited my requirements. I wanted something that was clean and uncluttered. Plus I wanted one with 3 columns.

I am pretty pleased with it.

Oh…and of course I checked whether the new theme was still ok on Firefox and Internet Explorer. All is good

One of the new things I have learned recently is the ability to track conversions on ClickBank while using AdWords.This post goes into how you can start implementing this tracking system, its limitations and possible solutions for you.

As any good marketer knows, tracking what works and what doesn’t work to convert sales e.g. keywords, is vital to determining your success in a market. I previously thought that it was not possible to track keyword conversions for ClickBank, as I was not able to add Google conversion scripts to the publisher’s “Thank You” page.

I now know that ClickBank allows you to add a unique TID (Tracking ID) to your hoplink. This enables you to see the TID everytime someone purchases an item off ClickBank.

How Does It Work?

Well your normal hoplink would look like:

http://YourAffiliateCode.ThePublisherCode.hop.clickbank.net/

To add a TID to the link, you only need to add ?tid=xyz after your hoplink. Where xyz would be a unique ID number. So that your modified hoplink will now look like this:

http://YourAffiliateCode.ThePublisherCode.hop.clickbank.net/?tid=xyz

How To Put This Into Practice?

In an AdWords campaign, you want to be able to know which of your keywords ultimately converts to sales. So assuming you are selling a single product from ClickBank, you want to assign a TID to each keyword that you have.

keyword 1 = assign TID 001
keyword 2 = assign TID 002
keyword 3 = assign TID 003

and so on (You are going to want to record these somewhere).

You then implement this by putting your assigned TIDs to the end of each keyword’s destination URL on AdWords. So if we took one AdGroup as an example:

AdGroup 1

keyword 1 destination URL:
http://YourAffiliateCode.ThePublisherCode.hop.clickbank.net/?tid=001

keyword 2 destination URL:
http://YourAffiliateCode.ThePublisherCode.hop.clickbank.net/?tid=002

keyword 3 destination URL:
http://YourAffiliateCode.ThePublisherCode.hop.clickbank.net/?tid=003

Putting It Together

Once someone clicks on your ad and ultimately buys, the TID will be captured by ClickBank and will now be shown on your sales reports.

By matching the converting TIDs to the keywords you assigned them to; you may then be able to eliminate those that convert poorly and/or are too expensive. Of course you will also be able to determine which keywords don’t convert at all.

Limitations/Obstacles

Just to be clear, if you want to track each keyword, you will need to assign each keyword a TID code regardless of match type. So even if you have the same keyword, but with different match types, then each match type needs it’s own TID. So for example:

cookie recipe = http://YourAffiliateCode.ThePublisherCode.hop.clickbank.net/?tid=001
“cookie recipe” = http://YourAffiliateCode.ThePublisherCode.hop.clickbank.net/?tid=002
[cookie recipe] = http://YourAffiliateCode.ThePublisherCode.hop.clickbank.net/?tid=003

Now…at this point you may be thinking “holy crap!”. Cos if you had several ClickBank campaigns, with several AdGroups, containing dozens, if not hundreds of keywords and with different match types to boot, that is going to be one hell of a TID list you need to manually track. I would then say “Yep!” you are right, cos I thought the same way.

One solution could be, to keep track of conversions at the AdGroup level. By giving all the keywords in a particular AdGroup the same TID code. You would then, at least know, which AdGroup converted.

Now, I felt this would be OK during the initial stages of your campaign. When you are just testing out the response to a new campaign and don’t necessarily want to put too much work into setting up your tracking.

But over the long run, I would want a robust tracking system to see the conversion rates of my individual keywords.

Fortunately, there are options for you to automate this process. But it will involve purchasing software/utilities to automatically assign TIDs for you. Personally, I have started to use Xtreme Conversions. It helps by assigning TIDs automatically to my keywords. And providing a system for me to upload my sales reports from ClickBank to tie everything back together.

Whatever your preference, manual or automated, remember tracking is key.